Communication terminals such as mobile phones and personal computers (PCs), etc. are well known. Such communication terminals are capable of establishing a communication session with a communication node such as a multimedia server, another communication terminal, etc. For example, a mobile phone user can view a movie by establishing a video streaming session between their mobile phone and a streaming video server.
A situation can arise in which a user would like to redirect their ongoing communication session to another communication terminal. For example, a user returns home and would like to redirect their ongoing streaming video session from their mobile phone to their home PC in order to watch the movie on a larger display. Similarly, when a user leaves home, the user may wish to redirect their ongoing communication session from their home PC to their mobile phone in order to continue viewing a movie after leaving.
In order to perform such communication session redirection, the user must inform the streaming video server of the new target communication terminal. For example, in the case of communication terminals using the Session Initiation Protocol (SIP), if the ongoing communication session was initiated by means of SIP, the user can redirect the session by sending a SIP INVITE message with the target terminal's SIP URI (Universal Resource Identifier) to the streaming video server.
However, to do so the user must know the target terminal's SIP URI and send it to the streaming video server. This is cumbersome for the user for several reasons.                There is no standard way for the user to know the SIP URI of the target terminal. For example, some PCs may present a SIP URI on the display when the user clicks on a dedicated icon; some SIP-enabled Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) may present a SIP URI when the user pushes a dedicated button. These varying processes significantly degrade usability in finding the SIP URIs of the target terminals since the user must know in advance how to locate the SIP URI for each target terminal to be used, and then take action to manipulate the target terminal in order to retrieve the SIP URI.        After the user has retrieved the SIP URI of the target terminal, cumbersome manual operations are still required for the user to input the SIP URI of the target terminal into the originating terminal. These operations are especially cumbersome, for example, when a mobile phone, which may have a crude input device, serves as the originating terminal.        Input operations of the SIP URI may be simplified if the user registers, in advance, the SIP URIs of frequently-used target terminals in, for example, an electronic phonebook. However, the user must still perform cumbersome manual operations to open the phonebook, search for and select the entry of the target terminal—requiring, for example, button-based menu navigation on a mobile phone. Moreover, if arbitrary terminals located in public spaces (e.g., cafeterias, shops, stations, museums, etc.) are to serve as target terminals, the electronic phonebook will not work effectively because the user cannot know the SIP URI of these terminals in advance and is thus forced to repeat manual input whenever the user wishes to use them.        